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Sen. Marco Rubio may have dealt the biggest blow in the GOP’s five-year war against ObamaCare.
 
A 2014 budget measure inspired by the Florida Republican… is pushing some insurers to drop out of the ObamaCare exchanges, experts say.
 
“I think this is one of the most effective things they’ve done so far in terms of trying to undermine the Affordable Care Act,” Tim Jost, a healthcare law professor at Washington and Lee University, said of Republicans in Congress.
This fall, more than a dozen health insurers representing 800,000 people have dropped out of the ObamaCare exchanges, many out of fear that the administration no longer has the cash to cushion their losses in the costly early years of the marketplace.
 
The nation’s largest insurer, UnitedHealthCare, specifically mentioned the specter of a funding shortfall last week when it threatened to end its participation in the exchanges after 2016.
 
The angst in the industry centers on an obscure program in the healthcare law known as “risk corridors” that was designed to shield insurers against losses.
 
Rubio in 2013 went on the warpath against the program, decrying it as a “taxpayer bailout.” He penned op-eds against it, testified about it as the star witness at a House Oversight Committee hearing and even made his case to top House Republicans including then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
 
“There is a problem with the way [ObamaCare] exchanges are now designed that have not yet received the attention they deserve, but I promise you’re going to be hearing a lot about it in the days to come,” Rubio said in a Senate floor speech in early 2014.
 
While Rubio’s attempt to scrap risk corridors altogether was unsuccessful, his push contributed to a policy rider that was inserted into a 1,603-page spending bill passed at the end of 2014.
 
 
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